James Ellroy

Page Updated: 05/03/03

Page 1

Page 2

James Ellroy - Page 1

by James Ellroy

About the Author (Photo (c) Marion Ettlinger)

Bibliography

First British Edition Century (2001)

Cold Six Thousand
From the acclaimed modern master of noir - a huge, electrifying, explosive new novel, his first since the international bestseller, American Tabloid.
Dallas, November '63 - the heart of the American Dream detonated. Wayne Tedrow Jr., a young Vegas cop, arrives with a loathsome job to do. He's got six thousand in cash and no idea he is about to plunge into the cover-up conspiracy already brewing around the assassination of JFK, no idea that this will mark the beginning of a hellish five-year ride through the private underbelly of public policy.

Ellroy's furiously paced narrative tracks Tedrow's journey: Dallas to Vegas, with the Mob and Howard Hughes, south with the Klan and J. Edgar Hoover, shipping out to Vietnam and returning home, the bearer of white powder, plotting new deaths as 1968 approaches...
The Cold Six Thousand is the 1960s under Ellroy's blistering lens, the icons of the era mingling with cops, killers, hoods, and provocateurs. Historical confluence as American nightmare. Fierce, epic fiction. A masterpiece.

First British Edition Century (1999)

Crime Wave
Reportage and fiction from the underside of L.A.
James Ellroy is a unique and powerful writer with a tough and explosive voice. Stylish, graphic and raw, he has been hailed as 'the most original crime writer of our time' and 'one of the best and most important writers in America today'. Author of thirteen fiction and non-fiction titles, this modern master of noir has garnered many literary awards. The film adaptation of his novel L.A. Confidential opened to mass critical acclaim and won two Oscars.
A self-confessed crime junkie, Ellroy's obsession with the dark side of L.A. is personal and vital, triggered by the murder of his mother when he was ten. This defining event spawned an early addiction to paperback crime novels, and his own writing is saturated in an often violent underworld of bent cops, politicians, stars, sleaze and rumour. Ellroy exploits memory, history, fact and fiction with relentless energy and panache. What emerges is an intense, mythical vision of Tinseltown in the second half of the twentieth century.
Crime Wave is a vivid portrait of James Ellroy's L.A. landscape. This special collection showcases his investigative non-fiction articles, Previously published in the American edition of GQ, and also includes two new novellas, Hollywood Shakedown and Tijuana Mon Amour.
Praise for James Ellroy
'The outstanding American crime-writer of his generation' Peter Guttridge, Independent
'Ellroy writes as if driven by demons. His brutal, staccato graffiti tips over into art.' Sunday Times
'Ellroy is a unique voice in American fiction' Sunday Telegraph
'One of the most important popular fiction writers in America, whose best books take their readers to the darker places of the human condition - a Tinseltown Dostoyevsky’ Time Out

First British Edition Century (1996)

My Dark Places
America's greatest crime novelist turns to non-fiction, and the mystery of his mother's murder.
On the night of 21 June 1958, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy left her home in EI Monte, California. She was found strangled the next day. Her ten-year-old son James had been away with Jean's estranged husband all weekend and was confronted with the news on his return.
Jean's murderer was never found, but her death had an enduring effect on her son who spent his teen and early adult years as a wino, petty burglar and derelict. Only later, through his obsession with crime fiction, an obsession triggered by his mother's murder, did Ellroy begin to delve into his past. Shortly after the publication of his ground-breaking novel White Jazz, Ellroy determined to return to Los Angeles and, with the help of veteran detective Bill Stoner, attempt to solve the thirty-eight-year-old crime.
The result is one of the few classics of crime non-fiction and autobiography to appear in the last decades, a hypnotic trip to America's underbelly and one man's tortured soul.

First British Edition Century (1992)

White Jazz
The Ultimate Noir Novel
Los Angeles,1958: a city on the make. A boomtown at the edge of a new era ripe for plunder. Outwardly placid - until webs of hellish violence intersect around one man.
Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD: lawyer/bagman/slumlord/bought-and paid-for mob killer. A man haunted by shameful lusts and dark curiosities.
The mob wants him to silence a Federal witness.
The DA wants him to shake down a pinko politician.
Howard Hughes wants him to dig up dirt on an actress who jilted him. Dave `The Enforcer' Klein: tightrope walker in a world of uneasy alliances.
His Chief of Detectives wants him to investigate a brutal burglary potentially embarrassing to the highest levels of the LAPD. An ambitious Federal prosecutor wants to destroy him. Dave Klein: soon to confront himself in the small corner of Hell his city has become.
`All I have is the will to remember.'
Dave Klein's will is to move us and horrify us. His story is a spiral through a time when the fix was in and bad men ruled by threats enforced sub rosa.
White Jazz captures that time with extraordinary power. Savage, melancholy, elegaic - it stands as both James Ellroy's masterpiece and the great `Noir' novel.

British Pbk Original - Mysterious Press (1989)

The Big Nowhere
Los Angeles,1950 . . . A city gripped by Red Scare hysteria and terrorised by a series of insanely violent homosexual slayings. As the communist witch-hunt spreads its net ever wider over Movieland - and a killer stalks the streets three men are drawn into a tortuous web of perversion and deceit: Danny Upshaw, a young detective obsessed with a murderer of unparalleled brutality; Buzz Meeks, who pimps for Howard Hughes; and Mal Considine, a law officer driven by a private compulsion that threatens to overwhelm him.
When the two investigations merge each man is forced to confront his own personal nightmare. But nothing can prepare them for the maelstrom they charge into . .
‘Violent ... fascinating. A first-rate crime novel’ Washington Post
‘Brilliant... Like Hammett and Chandler, but Ellroy adds layers they never dared. One of the most compelling crime novels in a long time’ Philadelphia Inquirer
'A major literary voice of the twentieth century. A masterpiece' Rave Reviews

About The Author
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His previous novels, The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L. A. Confidential, White Jazz and American Tabloid have won numerous awards and were international bestsellers. The film of L. A. Confidential, has won huge critical acclaim.
James Ellroy lives with his wife in Kansas.

Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.

Cold Six Thousand (Century, 2001)

Crime Wave (Century, 1999) Arrow Pbk Nov 99

My Dark Places (Century, 1996)

American Tabloid (Century, 1995)

White Jazz (Century, 1992)

The Big Nowhere (Mysterious Press Pbk, 1989)

Suicide Hill (Mysterious Press Pbk, 1988) (Lloyd Hopkins)

Clandestine (Allison & Busby, 1984) Arrow Pbk 1996

Dudley Smith Trio Pbk Nov 99

Dick Contino's Blues and Other Stories Short Stories

Murder and Mayhem Ed.

Because the Night (Lloyd Hopkins)

L.A.Noir: The Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy

LA Confidential

Blood on the Moon Filmed as 'Cop' (Lloyd Hopkins)

Silent Terror (Killer on the Road)

The Black Dahlia

Brown's Requiem